Imaging the night-side of Venus

Martin Lewis explains how near-infrared imaging can reveal heat radiation from Venus’s surface through its cloud layer and how amateur observers record surface-height changes and transient features.

The programme describes imaging around 1,000 nm, where Venus’s dense clouds become partly transparent to thermal radiation from the planet’s 460°C surface. The talk uses amateur images and the speaker’s own observing images from 2020, 2023 and early 2025.